He was an extraordinary character — a sort of severe and serious, eccentric character — who told me with great pride that his nickname, when he had been in the monastery for 20 years was Darth Vader. …

I told him about my meditation training. And I told him how irritated I was to have to sit there for three hours, how irritated I was … because I had thought that if I wanted to understand anything about Buddhism and what Buddhism had to offer, I thought I was supposed to read sutras and texts and, you know, think — like what I did in college. And he said, “Oh, you Westerners … You always want to know why you have to do something before you do it.” And he said, “In Japan, we make you do something, and then you learn ‘why’ afterward. … Sometimes, you just need to do something and learn the lesson later.” Which is perhaps a healthier way to live, because you can’t always know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Sometimes you simply have to go through and experience.

Yes, I thought, that’s exactly how it is. And it’s how it is in Orthodox Christianity. Maybe this is what the friend at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas meant when she told Julie and me, upon our entering the Orthodox church, “It will take you ten years to become Orthodox.” She meant “to begin to think like an Orthodox Christian.” I thought at the time that was a strange thing to say, but in the past year or two, I’ve come to appreciate the truth of it. If you surrender to the rituals, to the liturgical prayers, to the Psalms and all the rest, you begin to see things about yourself and the world that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and to experience the world in a new way.

In the newest Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers talks with a couple of theologians about art and theology, and how it is that visual art and music can convey religious truths that cannot adequately be captured in formal propositions. Listening to those interviews, I thought of the Commedia, and how Dante struggles in his verse to convey the experience of Paradise:

Once there we shall behold what we hold true

through faith, not proven but self-evident:

a primal truth, incontrovertible.

Words cannot capture the reality of what the soul experiences there. Here he writes of seeing Beatrice’s smile near the summit of Heaven:

The beauty I saw there goes far beyond

all mortal reach; I think that only He

Who made it knows the full joy of its being.

At this point I admit to my defeat:

no poet, comic or tragic, was

more outdone by his theme than I am now;

for as sunlight does to the weakest eyes,

so did the mere thought of her lovely smile

strike every recognition from my mind.

Yes. Yes! In Dante, to know God is not to philosophize about God, to reason about God, but to see God, and to love the sight with all your heart. Perception perceives love, and love is essential to knowing. How different that is from the way we in the West today perceive things. In one of his interviews, Ken Myers observes that the difference between the modern age and what preceded it is that in the pre-modern era (that gave birth to Dante, and that more or less died with Dante), people believed that the point of life was to conform the soul to Reality — to harmonize with a cosmic order that exists independently of the soul, but that can be known. In the modern era, man regards what he once saw as cosmos as, instead, inert matter that can and should be manipulated and shaped according to man’s will and genius.

I think what my friend meant when she said it would take a decade to become Orthodox is that to think as an Orthodox Christian means shedding seven centuries of the Western habit of mind characteristic of modernity. This is why I found Dante to be so resonant with Orthodox Christianity. Dante was fully Catholic, obviously, but the culture in which Dante lived was pre-modern, thus enchanted. The experience of Orthodoxy today is, to my perception, far more “enchanted” than the experience of Catholicism, except on occasions like the mass I attended at the Benedictine monastery in Norcia. That doesn’t make Orthodoxy more true than Catholicism, in the propositional sense, but I do think it means that in this time and place, the Orthodox vision helps modern people to see divine truths more clearly than Westerners (like me) whose inner eye is occluded by 700 years of teaching ourselves not to see the things that are.

I ordered a thin book after listening to the current Mars Hill Audio Journal, calledA Little Manual for Knowing. Its author is Esther Lightcap Meek, a philosopher interviewed in this edition of the Journal. The book is a practical manual of epistemology. In the introduction, which I read yesterday after the book came in, Meek writes:

Many people don’t think much about how we know because we take it for granted. But we tacitly presume some things about knowing. We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, “content,” true statements — true statement justified by other true statements. And while this isn’t exactly false, we tend to have a vision of knowledge as being only this. We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information — and we’re done — educated, trained, expert, certain.

This is a philosophical orientation, an unexamined one. It has a lot of appeal, because it is quantifiable, measurable, assessable, and commodifiable. It offers control and power. But we’ll see that the knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.

This is what the experience of Orthodoxy, especially these past two years, has taught me: to dwell constantly in an analytic, critical mode of being, as I tend to do, is to buffer myself against “good knowing.” My priest played a key role in healing me from my depression and physical illness by teaching me, through a prayer rule, how to disconnect from analytical engagement with the world, and to just be still in it. Believe me, I still struggle with this, constantly, but I have experienced the wisdom and truth of this method. Similarly, imaginative engagement with the art of Dante Alighieri led me to a healing experience of God in great beauty, and taught me that knowing God with the mind is important, but it cannot substitute for knowing Him with the heart. As the Yale Dantist Giuseppe Mazzotta says, in the end, the Commedia teaches us that true conversion cannot be other than a conversion of the heart; everything else must follow from that.

I recently read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book A Time to Keep Silence, a slim volume of reflections on his stays in monasteries. Leigh Fermor was a religious unbeliever, but he did believe in the power of monasteries to purify the vision. Here he is describing the experience of growing accustomed to the Benedictine abbey of St. Wandrille, to which he had retreated from Paris, seeking an atmosphere conducive to writing:

The period during which normal standards recede and the strange new world becomes reality is slow, and, at first, acutely painful.

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon. The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the house I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the church — Mass, Vespers and Compline — were almost my only lucid moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity. This new dispensation left nineteen hours a day of god-like freedom. Work became easier every moment; and, when I was not working, I was either exploring the Abbey and the neighbouring countryside, or reading. The Abbey became the reverse of a tome — not, indeed, a Thelema or Nepenthe, but a silent university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the reach of ordinary troubles and vexations. A verse from the office of Compline expresses the same thought; and it was no doubt an unconscious memory of it that prompted me to put it down: Altissismum posuisti refugium tuum …. non accedet ad te malum et flagellum non appropinquabit tabernaculo tuo. [Thou hast made the Most High thy refuge … no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. — RD]

Last night, about an hour before bedtime, my sons asked me if I wanted to take a walk around the neighborhood. No, actually, I did not; I don’t like going outside much. But I knew I should want to, so I did. It took about twenty minutes to make a loop through the neighborhood, a small subdivision out in the country. The houses are not close together; the night sky is clear from light pollution. After we had walked for a few minutes in the cool night air, I observed the canopy of stars above, and thought, look, how marvelous. I don’t know when was the last time that I had truly seen the stars. We passed by the house of a neighbor down the street, who was sleeping. A massive, Entish oak tree anchors the front yard. It was dark, and I was struck by the bigness of the living thing. I pass that oak every day, but last night, I saw it differently. It looked as if it dwelled in mystery, as if it were hiding a secret.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 36 comments

36 Responses to Thinking, and the Big Divide

First, regarding the monk in Japan… wax on, wax off. Weird that a junky 80s movie actually even attempted to wrestle with stuff like this. Which brings me to this:

“Listening to those interviews, I thought of the Commedia…”

Me too, but in a different way. I am am convinced that it’s crucial for kids to engage with the classics. I am pushing it for my own kids. My one reservation is… can they engage? The commedia was written for a popular audience that could react to it emotionally. But as Rod pointed out recently, to really understand it now you almost have to read it along with an academic course, or order one on tape, because it’s inaccessible in that way to modern readers.

So yes to Dante. And yes to Duck Dynasty, I suppose. But especially yes to Mr. Miyagi.

[NFR: But that’s true of so much Western art in modernity and postmodernity. We have to work at it. But it pays off bigtime. — RD]

OK, as long as you don’t create the impression that the “contemplative” position is somehow irrational, or just poetic. On the contrary, it something that science itself needs in order to be good science. At the end of the day, the “technicistic” mentality is first of all a reduction of REASON.

This of course gives me a chance for a Del Noce quote:

“Primacy of contemplation simply … expresses the essential metaphysical principle of the Catholic tradition, according to which everything that is participates necessarily in universal principles, which are the eternal and immutable essences contained in the permanent actuality of the divine intellect. So that all things – no matter how contingent they may be in themselves – translate or represent the principles in their own way and according to their order of being, because otherwise they would just be pure nothingness. … Conversely, primacy of action means interpreting spiritual life as a constant surpassing of what is given. But this surpassing implies desecrating the given, and thus negating tradition. Therefore, the idea of truth is replaced by those of novelty, authenticity, originality, efficacy etc. We thus arrive at the technological civilization, characterized as that in which intelligence is typified by scientific-technical knowledge.”

[NFR: Agreed — contemplation is not opposed to Reason, but the two are handmaids. Virgil was not opposed to Beatrice, but worked with her. — RD]

Rod, I was so sorry to read that you don’t like going outside. I was like that in my younger days. It was gardening that taught me my place on the planet. On all fours, face close to the dirt, doing a simple task. Secular worship at its best.

This is why we have the 19th century Romantic philosophers… who said that there is nothing religion does that art cannot do. A friend of mine once asked “If we don’t have religion then how are we not just robots in a big materialistic universe,” as if there was no intermediate ground. I asked him what religion could do that art could not… poetry, music, all the grand gestures. He was baffled at the simplicity of that answer and had no reply…

Whenever I hear these saccharine arguments about how our modern world is no longer “enchanted” or imbued with a sense of “transcendence” I think of the Romantic sensibility. Art is our gateway to the truly HUMAN. But that’s exactly what it is in my view: human… a word that means in its deepest sense the highest and lightest of being that is accessible to us. Some people have called it god, but I’m not that ambitious (in the pejorative sense).

[NFR: “Enchanted” is not a saccharine term, referring to Disneyfied pixie dust. Read Charles Taylor. It has a particular meaning in this context. — RD]

Rod – “After we had walked for a few minutes in the cool night air, I observed the canopy of stars above, and thought, look, how marvelous. I don’t know when was the last time that I had truly seen the stars.”

Dante (in various translations, I had to rely on googling since I’m away from home) – “To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,

And Following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far,
through a round aperture I saw appear

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”

“I return’d
From the most holy wave, regenerate,
If ‘en as new plants renew’d with foliage new,
Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars”

“as a wheel turns smoothtly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

I’ve always loathed the smugness of easterners with regard to the analytical bend of the west. “Oh, you westerners…” and the moment they get a few western dollars in their pocket they forget how enlightened they are compared to us and buy designer western products in excess.

This quote is illustrative of the problem: “I observed the canopy of stars above, and thought, look, how marvelous. I don’t know when was the last time that I had truly seen the stars.”

Well, you didn’t see the stars any more truly than a guy who looks up and says, “wow, swirling masses of hydrogen and helium that are far away from us.” You had an emotion about stars, fine. And maybe a profound one. But I don’t see how you’ve “truly” experienced the stars any more than someone else.

Also spake Rod: I think what my friend meant when she said it would take a decade to become Orthodox is that to think as an Orthodox Christian means shedding seven centuries of the Western habit of mind characteristic of modernity.

The analogy that comes to mind immediately is learning a second language. I experienced this from both sides, observing my mother work with (and occasionally struggle with) English having grown up being fluent in the two other language groups (Germanic and Slavic), and my going through the then standard torture of required foreign language credits in public school.

And so, my humbly submitted analogy: It would take a decade (or more!) to become fluent in a foreign language, requiring us to think as native speakers think, shedding a lifetime of automatically thinking in our birth language.

Rod, the lesson the Eastern masters try to teach us (and their own students) is that labels mean nothing. We are creatures of habit, and the source of or reason for the habit is totally irrelevant. Indeed, the essence of Zen from my personal POV is also the justification of “do it first and analyze it later.” Practice is the only effective teacher of theory. We know this under the sarcastic cliche “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

My fumbling attempt to echo the masters:

A Zen master was accosted by his student, running up to him and nearly knocking him over in his excitement. The student was disheveled and hadn’t bathed for days. “I got it, master! I understand it now!”

The master smiled. “So, tell me.”

The student’s face went blank. “Well, I don’t have the exact words, but I can tell you how it feels.”

“Exactly right,” the master said. “If we share our feelings about it and find a common ground of understanding, explaining the details becomes unnecessary. We can always explore them later over a nice cup of tea.”

When I was young and foolish, I hung with Buddhists and one said that the void could not be understood by either reason or contemplation. It was the stopping of the mind and living in the experience. And even then it is not understood, merely experienced.

But we do not live in the void. It does not fix the plumbing. Hence the Zen saying, “Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water.”

My daily life keeps providentially encountering things I find in this blog. Two weeks ago I was catching up with an old friend and let slip that I, a Protestant, reformed, evangelical, who is serving in a Pentecostal, rural church, had lately felt drawn to the practices and beauty of Orthodoxy. The admission fell out of my lips and landed wet on the floor. I hoped he hadn’t noticed or would be gracious enough not to comment. But there it was, lying there waiting for judgement.

His reply to my newfound attraction to Orthodoxy was a delighted “you too?” Our conversation quickly turned to Smith and Taylor, immanent frames, and the power of Orthodox practices and we reveled in a way available only to friends who discover a shared hidden interest. We even discussed how “high church” (meaning many liturgical practices and steeped in tradition) may be the inevitable form of Christian faith. These interchanges occurred between your post on searching for St. Francis and your post a few days later commenting on how Orthodoxy may be the form of the church which survives the coming dark days. Your posts were bookends to our conversations, initiating and confirming things we had been experiencing in our own lives.

Now, today, I was reading J. K. A. Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom” which argues that the human condition is poorly described by a primarily cognitive model (thinking entities thinking thoughts) and better described by a liturgical model (feeling bodies feeling the world). I took a break and browsed this blog to discover this post about how “doing things” has a power just “thinking things” does not. Providential.

All this is happening while I’m designing a new ministry for my church to adress member retention. It hasn’t taken me long to realize how inadequate so many of our discipleship practices are. Sunday School is our main (only) means of discipling our members. The adults sit through a 45 minute sermon. The youth sit through a 45 minute sermon. The children sit through a five minute bible story and then make crafts or play a game which is only tangentially related to the story.

This is what we expect to transform people into the image of Christ?!

We need to fix this. “Desiring the Kingdom” specifically deals with higher education. We, the Church, need a book that applies these concepts to discipleship practices in the local church. These liturgical practices have a unique power to protect us from the immanent frame that surrounds us, because they fight against it with the same weapons more purposefully applied.

This “Desiring Discipleship” (if I titled it) could make up new practices and liturgies out of whole cloth. I don’t think this is the way to go. It would be too easy to incorporate some of the silliness of our era. The better option is to return to existing liturgies which have been tested over centuries. Things like Icons, Saints, prayer rules, art and prayer beads have helped form and sanctify Christians almost the entire time there has been an institutional Church. We would do much if we just returned Communion to the center of our communal worship instead of avoiding it because it is “too Catholic.” (My church practices Communion only once a year!)

When I was young, full of ideas, and short on experience I was sure I was called to reunite Protestants and Catholics, to unify the Church. I gave up on that “calling” years ago when I found a little wisdom. Now I find myself trying to unite Protestants with Catholic and Orthodox liturgical practices after finding a little more wisdom. Life’s a funny thing.

Reminds me of what Jamie Smith is always talking about in his Desiring/Imagining the Kingdom works. As humans we seem to flourish when we approach the world from the inside-out and are pulled toward our passions, rather than by taking a top-down approach in an attempt to thrive simply on non-experiential knowledge. We are much more a result of what we habitually do rather than what we habitually think. Is there any true knowledge gained outside of authentic experience? That’s an honest question that I do not know the answer to. I’ve known children with mental disabilities who have a much deeper understanding than I do of human nature, even though I am able to “learn” more than them through the social sciences, psychology and cognitive science.

Robert H. – I was also sorry to learn that Rod doesn’t like to go outside. But for me, my younger days were all about going outside. I was lucky enough to grow up in a rural area, and spent countless hours tramping through wood and fields, often alone, often just with my dog, mostly just to be outside and take it all in. Definitely contemplative (although I would not have phrased it that way at the time).

Our family is Roman Catholic, but our son attends an Orthodox grade school. I’ve accompanied him on field trips to a nearby Orthodox monastery where he receives religious instruction from one of the sisters. To put it mildly, listening to her always gives me the creeps. Father Zosima she ain’t.

It’s as if all she can do is parrot what she’s been fed over too many years. There’s very little actual thinking going on. Weird stories about some woman who was being a “Martha” and skipping Liturgy until God caused her kitchen to catch on fire — so don’t skip Liturgy! You ask her a non-polemical, non-controversial question and she’s completely flustered — simply because the question was not on the script. And there’s this strange and profound distrust in reason that reminds me of certain segments of American Evangelicalism (as in Mark Noll’s “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).

I also sense very vaguely that there might be some unhealthy patriarchal shenanigans going on — the women appear to be too meek, too passive, too submissive, if that makes sense. It’s as if in that community, the pendulum has swung too far away from the strident idiocy that is post-modern western feminism.

Anyway, that’s the view from my little corner — a small sample size, admittedly. But I’ll take Augustine and Aquinas any day over what comes across as anti-Reason for its own sake, for the sake of identity, for the sake of being different from those western rationalist papist heretics, for the sake of being into “mystery.”

[NFR: Calm down, you’re not getting “western rationalist papist heretic” rhetoric from me. I don’t believe that caricature. Nevertheless, there are clear differences between the experience of the faith within Catholicism and within Orthodoxy. I think the differences have less to do with theology, strictly speaking, and more to do with a cultural orientation. Whatever the differences between Augustine, Aquinas, and the Eastern fathers, they were much closer than the experience of contemporary Catholicism. All of which is to say simply that Western Christianity encountered modernity and was dramatically changed by it; the East, by virtue of its remoteness (Russia) and oppression under Islam, was preserved from most of those changes. That’s certainly not to say that the East doesn’t have its own problems, among them a hysterical fear and loathing of the West, as I have often lamented here. And yes, you can find plenty of complete nuts in Orthodoxy too, like your nun. No religion is free of them. — RD]

I grew up very naturally “bathing” in that local awareness. I never missed the trips and visits to other places my friends described — we simply never had the money for such things — because they came back with stories which I realized while they were telling them that I had similar ones to tell right from my own back yard.

Years later, having had that child-like openness thoroughly suppressed by “normal” society, the early experiences of my Pagan path shocked me back to them. I found, at a more mundane level, that Light, Dark and Shadow redefine things we perceive; not changing their essence, but revealing aspects of their essence we miss otherwise.

Night has always been my favorite period of the day. My severe myopia is much less of a disadvantage when the details of an object or place are not lit well enough to be discerned even by perfect vision. Dark prompts us to disengage a bit from our usual dependence on vision, and as you discovered with that oak tree there are ways of looking at a thing not possible in the broad Light of day.

When you said that “people believed that the goal in life was to conform the soul to Reality” it reminded me of this excellent insight from CS Lewis:

“I have described as a ‘magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better.
[…]
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”

Also, speaking of the Orthodox Church, I thought you might enjoy this tribute piece on Jaroslav Pelikan by Timothy George. It speaks of his long journey to the East and it made me think of some things you have written on it:

Reason and intellect are not opposed to the divine, quite the contrary. They are merely insufficient to capture the divine. Three months before he died, St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Christian Church, had a mystical experience which led him to say that all his writings were as straw and he did not write again. This was not a retraction or refutation of his writings, simply an acknowledgement that what he had experienced was beyond reason and intellect alone. His massive work is still among the most challenging and required study for priests. For more:

That Japanese Zen monk went right to the point. In his society, people obey before they ask why. The Westerner has been trying to perform the reverse: reason before obedience. Perhaps this monk’s observation is at the root of how it was possible for Japan to conquer a swatch of Asia and pull the U.S. into WWII. And perhaps it is precisely the reprioritizing that we have and are still slowly learning to do is of the essence. Had Japan not put the cart before the horse would they have been so eager to engage in warfare?

The cessation of discursive reasoning or at least pushing it into the background for the cultivation of the intuitive encounter with divinity also has it place in emphasizing obedience before reason. But this approach should not apply to other aspects of our society.

Rod, this so resonates with me. Looking back, I can see that my growth has happened when I have experienced, and then contemplated. In fact, even those times when I thought I understood what was going on, I often was wrong, or didn’t yet have a full grasp of the depth of the experience.

At the behest of a friend, I recently took up kundalini meditation, which makes use of postures, hand movements and chanting or singing. It’s totally opened up my prayer life. I had previously always felt that singing and working to help another were some of the best ways to worship God, and this new-to-me form of active contemplation has increased my awareness of His hand in my life.

It makes sense to me that we have bodies for a reason, and it’s not only to try or tempt our spirit. Brother Ass can be a helpful teacher, too, and we can enact ritual with our body and figuratively and literally clean our hands and stand in holy places until our chatty little minds catch up.

Question: is it possible that Japanese people obey first, then understand, partially because their lives are more marked my everyday ritual than the average Westerner’s? They have already had the opportunity to appreciate the role of ritual in their lives?

I just had an aha moment. My grandmother’s grandfather was a samurai who wanted to Westernize by converting to a Christian church, and chose to join the Russian Orthodox church. I wonder if that was because of the similarities in ritual observance between RO and the Shintoism Bunzaburo Kawaii grew up in.

It took about twenty minutes to make a loop through the neighborhood, a small subdivision out in the country. The houses are not close together; the night sky is clear from light pollution.

Such an unobstructed environment is a real blessing. Partake of it as often as you can.

If time is a constraint, such an evening walk is a perfect time to do cycles of prayers; it also more than qualifies as light physical activity, freeing that item from any List of Things To Do.

After we had walked for a few minutes in the cool night air, I observed the canopy of stars above, and thought, look, how marvelous. I don’t know when was the last time that I had truly seen the stars.

Definitely not something to deprive yourself of in the winter. Orion blazes truly gloriously in the early evening. Sirius and Capella shine quite bright nearby, and Betelgeuse and Rigel and Bellatrix all have a distinct color to them that you can note in a clear area.

It’s been dry as a bone outside the last few nights. The stars are accordingly bright and multi-hued, red and violet and yellow, even here in the city. It won’t last, the moon is gaining and a front is due in a couple days. The first tendrils of it are creeping in from the west, and washing out the stars now. The air, though, is an elixir, dry ozone tones slowly getting crowded out by a green fresh current, the harbinger of rain.

“in the pre-modern era […] people believed that the point of life was to conform the soul to Reality — to harmonize with a cosmic order that exists independently of the soul, but that can be known. In the modern era, man regards what he once saw as cosmos as, instead, inert matter that can and should be manipulated and shaped according to man’s will and genius

According to Emanuele Severino, one of the greatest philosopher of our time, the radical belief that the cosmos is ultimately nothing and that shapes that matter can take can be pushed into nothingness and brought into reality from nothingness – this extreme form of nihilism – has it roots in Greece and is foundational to the West. He calls it “the West’s Folly”.
Meditation and contemplation are actually gifts from the East.

Having said that, I personally think that one of the great limitations of our contemporary Western thought is that we focus on only one level of knowledge: the perceivable, which we can know with our physical senses and inductive reasoning, and the mental, which is the domain of conceptual entities (ideas) and deductive reasoning. This is the domain of the mind, and has the narrowest scope. The extraordinary achievements of this kind of knowledge in mastering the material world are such to obfuscate the higher spheres of knowlege, which are however necessary: the second level of knowledge is the axiological, which is achieved through our moral sense and is the domain of the soul. The axiological level encloses and surpasses the mental level, as it illuminates matter and ideas with the light of Eternal Good. The third level of knowledge is achieved through meditation and contemplation, and is the mystical, which allows to get a glimpse of the essence of the Eternal Being. This third sphere is the realm of the spirit, and contains and encompasses the lower two.

We need to revert to the full ability to know we have been endowed with, if we want to achieve the fullness of our Being.

(Of course, this is a medieval and dantesque system. The three spheres of knowledge: the mental-material, axiological and spiritual, match the three levels of being: the body-mind, the soul and the spirit, and the three instruments of knowledge: the rational, the moral and the meditative-contemplative. Which are also proper to the three disciplines: science, philosophy and religion)

Great piece, Rod. The book that started me thinking along these lines is Discerning the Mystery by patristic scholar Andrew Louth. I first read it about eight years ago, but wish I would have discovered it a lot earlier. Louth was an Anglican at the time he wrote it, but later became Orthodox.

I apologize for the misunderstanding, Rod, I wasn’t imputing the “western heretic” charge to you, only describing the sense I get from the aforementioned nun, some of my fellow school parents, and some Orthodox materials I’ve read. In fact, I think your commitment to ecumenism (without watering anything down) is refreshing.

And I hear you. After many years of not even noticing anything remotely resembling Taylor’s “enchantment” due to my temperamental idiosyncracies, I now know enchantment is true. It took a couple of women, grace, G. K. Chesterton, and Peter Kreeft to show me the magic of wonder. Just last year I was at a glorious beach in Scotland with my brother when I suggested to him that “all the world is poetry; no stone is merely a stone.” This fact is true and I know its veracity down to my bones. I think David Bentley Hart would agree. Heck, my brother, a physics professor, agreed.

(That very night on the beach, the stars were out across a moonless sky, a wondrous spectacle; I’ve since bought some binoculars and two weeks ago was following Comet Lovejoy near the Pleiades.)

[From a comment above: Is there any true knowledge gained outside of authentic experience?]

Nobody needs to experience “if a = b and b = c then a = c” to know its veracity. Also, you know the Kerguelen Islands exist even though you’ve never been there. This dim view of reason — and dim view of authority, for that matter — is simply wrong. Experience counts, but there’s more to the story.

[From another comment above: Well, you didn’t see the stars any more truly than a guy who looks up and says, “wow, swirling masses of hydrogen and helium that are far away from us.” You had an emotion about stars, fine. And maybe a profound one. But I don’t see how you’ve “truly” experienced the stars any more than someone else.]

Rod and the materialist cannot both be right about the stars. Either stars are just matter or they’re not just matter. It’s called the principle of non-contradiction. At the very least, let’s the kind of sane people who can tell the difference between two mutually exclusive propositions. The poison arises when we say both experiences are “true” and therefore both claims are “true.”

Regarding enchantment, I’m with Rod, as noted above. Interestingly, we the enchanted are closer to pre-modern pagans than we are to post-modern disenchanted materialists / hedonists. If you can, look up “The Abolition of Man” and its discussion on the sublime. The materialist who looks at stars and sees only gas and dust is a man without a chest, and therefore less of a man, less human. His head only looks bigger because his chest has shrunk; his is a truncated rationality operating poorly, ironically.

If my children ever stand next to a beautiful waterfall or gaze across the Grand Canyon or look up at the stars without any sense of wonder and awe, then to some degree I will have been a failure as their father. Their humanity will be the poorer for such disenchantment. It sounds crazy, but no stone is merely a stone.

Excellent and thought-provoking piece. I can recall hearing Wagner’s “Parsifal” for the first time and feeling a sense of timelessness. Indeed, in one scene the aged knight, Gurnemanz, tells Parsifal that they are about to enter the castle of the Holy Grail “where time and space are one” (Wagner anticipating Einstein). And I am sure Mr. Dreher has experienced the same feeling from reading Dante.

I think we need to make a distinction between a healthy appreciation for traditional cultural immersion and a blind deference to authority. Japanese Buddhism, sadly, is more of an example of the latter than the former; it was, after all, forcibly “modernized” during the Meiji Restoration to the point where [male] monks don’t even have to observe celibacy (many Buddhists outside the Japanese tradition consider Japanese monasticism kinda a joke for this reason). And of course these same non -celibate monks sucked up to the imperialist Japanese regime’s bloodthirsty conquest of the Pacific. That’s not “tradition”, but rather a jingoistic authoritarianism, which is a big difference.

In earlier times the sense of wonder and awe was maintained naturally, so to speak. One could “outgrow” certain facets of it, but not altogether. Modernity and technology have made maintaining it far more difficult, and nowadays I’d say that it must be pursued and cultivated. See Dale Allison’s The Silence of Angels (a/k/a The Luminous Dusk) for a great discussion of this.

We are denizens of a faceless and merciless Nature, capable of great abundance and comfort one moment and great poverty and misery the next. We can escape it temporarily, we can find havens that are little more than hiding places with the bare necessities of survival, but we cannot ignore it.

Rod, I don’t mean this as commentary on you personally. I never believed about you that you were a fearful person. But engaging in life, just the mundane parts like standing in the dark looking at the stars, means taking risks. That you don’t (should we start saying didn’t) like it brings to mind this line from a movie.

God is love. Agape. I came to know of God through human knowledge and understanding (books, sermons and conversation). Through this process I slowly began to see and hear differently. Then it was revealed through my experiences that I was being transformed through God’s love. This process is what I later learned, was what St. Paul talks about, “dying daily.” I can philosophize about God, which is the mind trying to understand, and I can experience God, which has no full understanding in any human sense. This I call Wisdom. I know what I know which I do not question. This I call Faith. Love is all there is, God.

there is no doubt that a great thinking divide exists between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture, and its nature is something you appear to have nailed exceptionally well. I have trouble knowing why I am doing what I am doing despite knowing much of it is very bad for my physical and mental health, yet I never experience anything in day-to-day existence as deeply as I should.

As Sara Maitland implied in A Book of Silence and which I can correlate today as my rhythm is further disturbed by noisy building works on the swimming pool two “blocks” from my unit, the only experience one obtains from urban life is dissonance and aggression. This is celebrated by the architects of modern culture (“Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” being its motto) but the sense of shallowness in proletarian culture which drove many artists between 1890 and 1980 to Christian symbolism and often to explicit faith is all too evident.

Even very shallow reading of life and stays in monasteries and hermitages makes me feel something is missing, and that the truly faithful do have much the militantly atheist do not (and on some level even envy).